BLCKDGRD

Allegheny

We didn't ask why a small liberal arts school in Meadville Pennsylvania calls its sports teams the Gators, assuming the double alliteration  assonance then alliteration (doh) and rhythmic echoes of Allegheny and alligator the reason. Despite the stupid, we, and more importantly Planet, despite expecting not to from our drive-thru the night before, really liked the place.

Best: there are no core courses, but students must, at a minimum, major/minor (they can major/major), and the major and minor (or second major) cannot be from the same area of study: if you major in a social science (or natural science or humanities), you must major/minor in one of the other two. The cleverest way I've seen to guarantee a traditional liberal arts education.

It was also the first time this trip that Planet, who had scheduled the interviews herself, was interviewed by an actual Admission's officer rather than a rising senior. I was shocked - stupidly, I'm told - when a rising senior interviewed Planet first at Oberlin, then Kenyon, then Hamilton; that's standard operating procedure, I'm told.

I understand the interview serves mostly to show the potential student's level of interest in the school, but fuck that. I understand Oberlin and Kenyon and Hamilton don't give a flying fuck whether Planet applies or not, but Allegheny (and Earlham and Gettysburg) do. That's worth something, and if the cache an Allegheny degree defers isn't as cha-ching as an Oberlin degree, I'm not at all convinced the education and experience Allegheny delivers isn't as good if not better than Oberlin's. Or is this loser talk?

So we just walked out of the Admission's officer's office (he interviewed Planet for 45 minutes then brought me and Earthgirl in for another half an hour) when my cell vibrates, and it's Landru. He and Ilse are speed vacationing in Niagara Falls and then Toronto, which to get to requires them to I-79 north through Meadville Pennsylvania - they're sitting in a Ponderossa Steak House just off the interstate. SHAZAM! a twenty minute meet and greet! Heh. Luckily, they'd already eaten, sparing us. The cheerful, toothless, tongue-plugged waitress thought it charming.

We're home. I think we're done with first visits except for Carleton, in Minnesota, where Earthgirl went to school, which we'll (or at least Planet and Earthgirl will, depending on expense) fly out to see this fall. Planet will decide in the next month or so which schools she wants to do an in-semester overnight.

If I had to guess I'd say she wants to do all of them, which is to say that after all the visits of the last year, she's no closer to knowing where she wants to go than before we started. I say this sincerely: excellent.

Impatiently Waiting for Something New to Happen and Clinging to What, Having Already Happened, Slithers Off into the Brush without a Sound

No visits Thursday, though we did drive through Ithaca to look at both Cornell (too big) and Ithaca College (too ugly) because why not add more variables to mesh together into the mush?

We're in Meadville Pennsylvania to visit Allegheny College this morning. We drove through both town and campus last night. We were told the town is charming (it isn't except for the sculptures made out of highway signs in the parking lot of a state highway depot salt dome). We were told there were no Greeks at Allegheny (we saw houses). Heavy Greek life is a non-starter for Planet. I like Planet.

Oberlin feels like it was last March. We're ready to go home. Info session at Allegheny in an hour. Home in twelve hours.

No one got the sillyass allusion from Thursday's post:

No links for you today.

Hamilton, or: I Want to Thank Two Citizens from Baldwinsville NY for Giving Me Some Perspective

Hamilton's fine, bigger than Earlham, smaller than Oberlin, as pretty as Kenyon in its own different way - it's on top of hill with a dominating view of the Mohawk Valley - but meh, I'm growing bored with this.

No, it's not my wrestling with complicity (though I'm tired of that too), which I'd be pushing through regardless of these trips and my plans for my daughter's college education - I feel zero guilt for providing my child the education she wants no matter how many Afghan children Obama bombs into freedom tomorrow.

Our student tour guide today said he grew up in Gaithersburg MD.Gaithersburg MD? I blurted. Where? I grew up in Gaithersburg MD. O, wow, he shrugged. I don't live there now. When twenty minutes later another parent asked him what other schools he'd applied to, and he said he really wanted to get into Georgetown but Georgetown turned him down. I didn't blurt, Hey, I've got two degrees from Georgetown.

The admissions officer's speech - Why You Should Choose Hamilton and Why Hamilton Will Only Choose 28% of You - was delivered by someone who physically looked and had all the mannerisms of TV's Frank with none of TV's Frank sense of humor (for all he tried).

After Hamilton we stopped for the night at a hotel west of Syracuse. As I checked in I asked the desk clerk for dining options, and she said there was a list in the room, but the best in the area was just across the field behind the motel, the Quaker Steak and Lube, which now, as I type this, is filled with at least a hundred Harley-Davidson's. The house band, as you can imagine, is covering Skynyrd.

We drove to find the restaurants on the hotel brochure list, not to eat at any of them - Dinosaur BBQ, Outback Steak House, Daniella's Steak House - all in Baldwinsville NY, three miles up the road. We figured there would be something we could all agree upon, but nope - other than two more meat purveyors, there were two seedy pubs and a gruesome looking diner. Oh well.

We'd seen a Pizza Hut just off the interstate coming into town, thought, fuck, walked in, and stood for five minutes as the waitress argued with her boyfriend while wiping down tables. She finally sat us, but both Planet and I jumped up as she'd washed down the seats too. What's wrong, she said. The seats are wet, Planet said. What, you want me to dry them too, the waitress asked. No, I said, we'll just wait a minute for them to dry while we look at the menu. What, you want me to dry them too, cause I'm real busy, said the waitress. No, thanks, I said. We left. Fuck you, said the waitress.

We walked across the lot to the grocery store. It had a service deli with a big sign that said Deli/Subs. I asked the guy behind the counter, who was wiping down the sandwich-making area as if readying for closing, Are you still making subs? He said, I've only got two sub rolls left. I asked, Is that a yes or a no? I've only got two sub rolls left. So that's a no, I said, and then the  deli manager hurried over and said, Of course we're still making subs, and the guy said, But those two sub rolls are mine. I said, Thanks, that's OK, and when the manager turned her back he gave me the finger.

I don't tell this story for any point other than we're all miserable fucking bastards. The fuck-waitress and fuck-meat slicer making $9.50 an hour didn't know I'm a middle-upper-middle class elitist bastard from the boutiques of Moco on a trip to visit top-tier boutique liberal colleges - they'd have been just as shitty to anybody. Maybe we've always been miserable fucking bastards, but we're more miserable, more fucking, more bastards than at any other point in my lifetime.

Everybody I know (including and especially me) - in real life, in Blegsylvania, those who find me worthy, those who don't - are angrier, most miserable and nastier around the edges in search of petty little fits of empty triumph. What sucks about the clusterfuck isn't its apocalyptic ZOMG! but its leaching of common decency as it slowly reveals a pathetic and base commonality it pisses us off to acknowledge.

Stuff below the fold. (Updates)

Kenyon

I think Oberlin is a better fit for Planet - but if I was seventeen and choosing between the two, I'd choose Kenyon. I'd tell myself it's the English Department, that I'd be studying and sitting and discussing poetry in the same lounge

that Robert Lowell and (especially especially especially) James Wright sat and studied and discussed poetry in, but that's only one aspect of the monastic vibe that appeals to me about Kenyon. For all my hate of commercial and political Religion, I am the most religious motherfucker I know, or to perhaps put it better, I am attracted to the trappings and rituals of religiosity more than any other atheist motherfucker I know. Why do you think I evangelize Kind even as I cut myself exorcising my indoctrinated faiths?

That is was raining helped evoke the mood:

Gorgeous gray drippy dreary day, accentuating the limestone buildings and slate tile roofs, the stain glass windows illuminated not from without but from within, accentuating the wood floors and foot-worn staircases and wainscotted rooms, backgrounded the fairies playing flutes

the thousands of trees, the brown pine-needles on the footpaths, the steeples, the buildings' cornices and peaks

everything. Turn me eighteen, give me my staff and shawl, order me to my cell and my books.

Planet, eh... not so much.

One last picture, a stunning glass sculpture hanging in the alcove of one of the three new buildings in the science quad

 

and then more below the fold at the end of some links, another James Wright poem, a song....

Oberlin

New leader in the clubhouse. 4-1-4, with three mandatory January sessions plus a freshman seminar. No core courses, minimum nine credits each in the sciences, the social sciences, the humanities. Double majoring encouraged.

Planet would have two choices if she decided to major in music, a BA in Music through the college or a BA in Music Performance through the music conservatory. If the latter, she would need to apply to both the college and the conservatory. We've been warned by people before getting to Oberlin as well as by Oberlin admissions officers yesterday that the Conservatory degree is for musicians with serious professional ambitions and the appropriate dedication and drive. Planet will not be applying to the Conservatory.

 

Oberlin charters buses to and from campus to Boston, Chicago, New York, and DC at the beginning and end of semesters and Thanksgiving and Spring breaks, and students can ride for $100 round trip, which pleases me. Bands stop to play - last Spring both Animal Collective and Beach House came through, among others. Shuttles to Cleveland run weekends - we were told that Cleveland has the second largest theater district in America after NYC. Is that true?

Very pretty campus, small, not presumptuous town. The nearest town of size is Lorain, which we drove through and is a dump. Flat soybean farms surrounding. I wouldn't like it because the chances to backpack and deep wood don't exist, but it isn't an issue in Planet's case.

It's been a year since we made our first New England trip, and our impressions of Bowdoin and Middlebury and Williams have faded, so when I say I haven't heard Planet chirp so positively about a visit to any college that assertion is compromised by faded memories, but I haven't seen her beam as much at a school since our first visit to Gettysburg.

Kenyon this morning, then drive to NY to visit Hamilton.

Some links of note while they're still fresh, a poem, some music, below the fold:

Number Six

I had to travel to Vermillion, Ohio to finally find a canopus.

Vermillion is relentlessly, oppressively cute - the Sunday evening brass band and barber shop quartet on the village square prompted me to youtube episodes of The Prisoner.

We also drove through Oberlin the campus and Oberlin the town yesterday to get our bearings for today, when Planet interviews then we take the course tour and attend the info session. Since the most recent comparison is Earlham the campus and Richmond the town, DING! DING! DING! If Earlham wasn't already off the list (it was), it is so off the list now as to never have been on the list at all.

Then off to Kenyon, which Planet says she has no intention of applying for even if her favorite uncle went for a year before dropping out to move in with Robin Notficker; chances are he would not be her favorite uncle if he hadn't. We made the interview appointment before Planet learned that one of her bestfriends has Kenyon at the top of her list. I like Planet.